Event Description
Sound was first recorded and reproduced by Thomas Edison in 1877. Until about 1950, when magnetic tape use became common, most recordings were made on mechanical media such as wax, foil, shellac, lacquer, and plastic. Some of these older recordings contain material of great historical interest, but may be in obsolete formats, and are damaged, decaying, or are now considered too delicate to play. Unlike print and latent image scanning, the playback of mechanical sound carriers has been inherently invasive. Recently, techniques, based upon non-contact optical measurements, and data analysis, have been applied to create and analyze high resolution digital images, and to restore the audio content, of these materials.
This lecture will discuss the characteristics of early sound recordings and the use of this new technology as applied to a number of notable collections: field recordings of Native Americans and Canadians from the early 20th Century, the experimental sound recordings of Alexander Graham Bell, from the 1880’s, and ethnographic recordings collected by Milman Parry in Yugoslavia in 1930, which led to the oral-formulaic theory of epic poetry.
Event Speaker
Carl Haber, Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Please visit the event webpage for additional information. For more information, please email [email protected].
Hosted by the Columbia Climate School.
